Being superstitious is bad luck

Author: David

I’d like to share a project I’ve been working on. DroneDyno is an automated brushless motor test stand.

I want to be able to test my motor/prop/ESC combinations and learn more about all of them – on my workbench, not in the air!

The 3D design

It uses an ESP8266 controller which is like an Arduino but with WiFi. It has an interchangeable motor mount, a current sensor and a load cell (scae) to measure thrust and current (amps) consumption for different throttle settings.

The ESP8266 controller mounted on an interface board. The USB connector is just to provide power.

The controller handles everything – it throttles the motor up through a range of values recording thrust (in grams) and current (in amps) then uploading the results to a spreadsheet on Google Drive.

Results in a Google Drive spreadsheet

The project is still a work in progress the code is a mess but it works well. Once it’s cleaned up I’ll post it on GitHub along with the 3D design files.